VR games take advantage of eye tracking
This year we saw an increasing trend of utilizing eye tracking in VR games to optimize the computing power of VR headsets and create more natural interactions.
Tobii eye tracking has enabled dynamic foveated rendering for many XR devices. Similar to how our eyes and brain work in the physical world, the computing power of XR devices can only focus on where our eyes reveal our attention. The savings can then be used for other critical tasks, such as maintaining high framerates, which is essential to run demanding content like games. Such savings will be exponential for future XR devices as display advances to 8K, 16K and beyond.
"Foveated rendering on PS VR2 can bring a massive reduction in GPU usage while producing the same perceptual quality – and, combined with eye tracking technology, the performance gains are even better...We’ve also seen gains up to 3.6x faster when foveated rendering is combined with eye tracking."
-- Unity
By leveraging the power of our eyes and intuitive understanding of visual cues, XR devices can enable a level of natural and immersive interaction with virtual environments. Even better, it achieves this without requiring users to learn new behavior patterns.
Here are some of the reviews from the media:
"You can select dialog choices with characters by simply looking at an option and hitting a face button instead of swiping around with an analog wheel. It’s so seamless that I almost forgot I was doing it sometimes — and I never want to go back."
-- The Verge
"And in a game like Horizon: Call of the Mountain, you can use that gaze tracking to navigate menus. And very quickly, I found this much preferred over your standard kind of head tracked look pointer...I found it so much easier and so much more intuitive and natural to just use my eyes to move the cursor..."
- Adam Savage's Tested.
"... the fleeting glance was so crucial to making me feel like I was really there, really being given the stink eye by a character, that I couldn't help but lose myself in the moment... It's the kind of immersion I haven't gotten from VR in a while."
- WIRED
To help developers leverage eye tracking better, Tobii delivered a talk at GDC 2023 on pushing the limits of immersion in next-gen games using state-of-the-art eye and head tracking. It gives you a deep dive into eye and head tracking technology and its use cases in games for PC and XR devices. Tips and tricks for avoiding design traps are also provided to help developers better adopt this technology to enhance immersion in their games.